3 'Smart' Habits That Are Sabotaging Your Success

over the last few years of building multiple businesses and a YouTube channel I've had my fair share of being stuck and breaking through the times when I was stuck wasn't because of a lack of motivation or Talent or even resources it was making what I thought were smart decisions yet some of my biggest breakthroughs came from ignoring what I felt like was responsible advice and doing the opposite so today I wanted to share three traps that feel like good decisions but are actually keeping you stuck because I've fallen for every single one them number one

the safety blanket trap so I did my first proper YouTube live stream on Sunday and even though I'm pretty comfortable with public speaking and I've done it for years in my banking job the thought of going live online in front of over 2,000 people was just terrifying there was no amount of motivation that could give me there motivation alone just wasn't cutting it when I talked to a few of my friends about doing this live stream and most of them responded as my comfort blanket in a nice way suggesting solutions to avoid it maybe just

pre-record it you don't have to do it thinking of other ways that I could Dodge this thing and sometimes that is exactly what you want to hear but it's important to recognize that Comfort can be the very thing that's also keeping you exactly where you are because then I had a conversation with someone who regularly speaks in front of massive crowds and instead of offering the comfortable way out she hit me with something that completely shifted my perspective she said when you're 90 years old looking back at your life are you going to remember the

live stream that went wrong or are you going to regret all the opportunities you missed because you were too afraid to try this isn't about a live stream it's about who you become when you stop letting fear make your decisions and she was so right that fear didn't just shrink it completely vanished as soon as I did it but what this taught me is that neither group The comforting friends or the challenging one was wrong they were both just reflecting their own realities one group was seeing through the lens of comfort and safety while another

was seeing through the lens of growth and possibility and had I not met this person I would have just found a way not to do it think of it like this humans are basically thermometers we adjust to the temperature of our environment if you're surrounded by people who think starting a YouTube channel or a podcast is risky and scary guess what that becomes your normal that fear becomes your default temperature put yourself around people who casually talk about building big businesses or taking risks or trying new things suddenly those scary things start feeling pretty normal

your Baseline temperature rises without you even having to push that's why the opinions you take in when you're making an important decision is super important and the people around you at that time are setting your normal thermostat when you're around people who are constantly pushing boundaries and growing that becomes your Baseline they don't just influence you they completely reshape what you believe is possible for yourself and the more and more successful people I meet they tell me the same thing their success came from putting themselves in rooms where their biggest goals were someone else's normal

day where their their scariest move was someone else's warmup so think about what temperature is your environment set to right now and more importantly is that temperature helping you grow or just keeping you comfortable and there are times that you may not have the access to the right environment or you may not be able to surround yourself with the right people at the very start of your journey but in today's world often that doesn't have to stop you and that leads me perfectly to today's sponsor skillshare skillshare is the largest online learning community for creatives

with thousands of classes led by industry experts who are actually doing what they teach when I first started my YouTube channel no one in my circle or in my group was a content creator I had no one to learn from directly that's where skillshare became my virtual environment for growth what I love about skillshare is how it creates that learning environment I've been talking about but on demand whether you're interested in film making illustration productivity business or design you're surrounded by experts and fellow Learners who are on the same Journey the platform is designed with

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just starting out or looking to level up you're always in the right environment for your stage the first of 500 people to use a link in my description will get one month free trial of skillshare thank you so much skillshare for sponsoring today's video number two the maybe tomorrow trap you know what's fascinating about procrastination it's not actually about being lazy I know some seriously talented ambitious intelligent people who are actually stuck in what I call the maybe tomorrow trap they have this stream this goal this thing that they really want to do and they

think about it constantly they research about it they plan about it they talk about it they can see it so clearly in their mind but they just never start I'll start when I have more time I'll do it when everything's perfect I just need to learn a little bit more first the timing's not quite right and here's the dangerous part these sound like really responsible decisions it feels smart to it if it was mature to prepare more that's exactly what makes this trap so lethal it disguises fear as wisdom and what I find fascinating is

how this trap works like compound interest but in Reverse for instance when you invest money compound interest creates this beautiful upward Curve Your Money makes money which makes more money small amounts compound into massive results over time but there maybe tomorrow trap it works in Reverse every time you wait you're not just losing that day you're losing all of the compound benefits that day could have created think about content creation for example that first video you don't make you're not just missing one video you're missing the skills you would have learned from making it the

feedback you would have gotten the improvements you would have made in video 2 the audience who would have found you the confidence you would have built the momentum you would gained and just like compound interest the costs get bigger and bigger over time not smaller the gap between where you are and where you could have been just grows exponentially and the worst part is that we don't feel the cost we don't wake up feeling all the ways of all those Mayes piling up because we don't know what could a bit and this leads me to

a simple question that cuts through all the excuses what would you do if you gave yourself permission to be bad at it if you accepted that your first attempt won't be your best attempt because that permission that permission to start messy to learn publicly to be embarrassingly bad at something new that's not just the way out of the maybe tomorrow trap it's the price of entry for anything worth doing number three the complexity trap the fascinating thing about success is that we tend to over complicate it in fact I'm notice that the longer someone stays

stuck the more complex their solution becomes so for instance I was talking to someone who wanted to start getting fed and when they first started thinking about it the plan was really simple they were like oh I'll just go to the gym three times a week but they didn't start and then a month later I checked in I was like oh how's your gym session going and they were like oh I need the perfect workout split I need the meal prep containers I also need the workout app and the gym clothes and um I'm going

to buy the food soon as well and then another month later they still hadn't started but now they had bought their Fitness subscription and they had even more plans with each layer of complexity that you add you feel like you're getting closer to starting but actually each new addition just creates another excuse not to begin and this happens everywhere people wanting to start a business get stuck building the perfect website instead of getting their first customer people wanting to create content spent months planning their entire strategy in instead of just making their first video and

addressing all these complexities feels productive it feels smart each new thing you add feels like you're getting closer to the perfect solution but often complexity is just fear wearing a productivity mask if you look at the most successful people or the most successful Creations in the world the first iPhone could barely do anything compared to its capabilities today Amazon started by just selling books Facebook was just a way for University or college students to connect they didn't wait to build the perfect solution with all the equipment all at once they started with the simplest version

that could work the truth about complexity it's usually not making your solution better it's making it harder to start every feature you add every condition you create every new thing you decide you need to do before you can begin they are all just new ways to stay stuck and how do you get out this trap you ruthlessly simplify ask yourself what's the simplest version of this that could work what could I do today with what I already have and what would this look like if it was easy those are three really simple mindset shifts that

completely changed the way I approach anything that I do and if you if you have found yourself falling into one of these traps let me know what's the first action you're going to take to reverse it thank you so much for watching don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and if you enjoyed this video you'll also enjoy this video over here